Gelli plate experiments

As part of the DecoArt Media Team and collaboration with Gelli Arts I have been playing with gelli plates and the Premium Acrylic Paints.

I am not a complete newbie to the gelli plate and have played on numerous occasions to get some background prints to use in my journals but I've never really thought through developing a process of steps I could follow again. So I scoured Pinterest and Youtube and found some fabulous videos by Alice-ART. After watching several of her videos I thought I'd try and work out some steps to work with - you'll see it didn't completely work!!!

Gather supplies and choose your paint palette. Gelli Art kindly sponsored the plate and brayer for the DecoArt Media Team members so this is some playtime before I got going with my July project.

Pick fresh grasses and leaves.

Choose some flower die cuts

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Use the phthalo turquoise and sap green, brayer roughly and quite thickly over the gelli plate and pull a print. Repeat with another clean piece of paper and pull again just to clean off the gelli plate.

Brayer over a thick layer of lighter green , blue, cream and white.

Lay on the natural foliage and pull a print with one of the dark backgrounds. 

Leave the leaves in position and brayer over some cream, magenta and yellow. 

Remove the leaves and replace with the flower die-cuts.

Take the second piece of the dark green original print and pull another print from the layers and colours you just added. You'll see slightly different photos here as I repeated the process a second time to get more images to show you.

My die-cuts kinda stuck to the paper the first time I did it so I had to pull them off and some stayed behind. So you know what they say 'embrace your imperfections' but actually from a mixed media point of view I really like this.

Sadly the dark green flowers didn't work for me so I'll have to rethink my steps.

I have a collection of other prints I took with spare pieces of paper along the way. What I really love are the backgrounds that appeared. You'll probably see more of those coming soon.

Have you noticed I didn't use the leaves? I also had a little play with them too.

xxx